Ten years ago open source projects faced a long list of barriers to entry. Source hosting was a pain in the ass. Wiki hosting, Mailing List hosting, bug tracking, all of these things we can now take for granted were actually quite hard to set up and maintain as recently as 5 years ago. […]

and then he adds that

the world has changed Apache has become a net negative for its projects.

Mainly, Mikael says, GitHub has leveled the entry field and the layer of politics added by the Apache Foundation are not necessary anymore.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation wrote a response, titled of course Foundations Considered Useful. He lists some of the important things that Eclipse does:

A small sampling of the core value-add that happens within the Eclipse Foundation and its community would include:

IP management. Although we often get criticized for being overly focused on the topic, nobody does IP management better than Eclipse. Which is a huge part of fulfilling our mission of delivering product-ready software platforms. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it is absolutely a core value, and one not easily replicated.

Predictability. The Eclipse community has shipped its major platform release on time to the day for eight years. Last year’s release was 46 MLOC, so we are talking about a non-trivial amount of code. The processes that we have in place to co-ordinate the activities and release engineering for 60+ projects absolutely require some amount of centralized support.

Branding and community. The Eclipse brand means something to people. Millions of developers around the world use Eclipse or Eclipse-based products every day. They have confidence in the software and the community that delivers it. Looking inside the community, there is definitely a pride and a sense of community that comes with being part of Eclipse. Anyone who has ever been to an EclipseCon has seen this firsthand.

Industry collaboration. Obviously GitHub has been wildly successful in fostering community-led open source. However, there are lots of instances where large and conservative corporations are looking at how to get involved in open source. In many cases, their business motivation is to collaborate with other industry players to create shared industry platforms. The kind of work that goes into facilitating these ventures goes far beyond picking a license and starting to hack some code. The processes that organizations like Eclipse and Apache bring to the table for project incubation, development processes, license management and IP contribution management are critical success factors.

Both articles are interesting reading for the OpenStack community while we think about our own foundation. What do you think?

What a week! Ubuntu Developer Summit is one of the best meetings I have attended to. Here are a few things that impressed me most.

The infrastructure is amazing! The networking is astonishingly good. I learned that the Ubuntu team bypasses the usually lame the Internet connections provided by the hotels and puts down their own. Ubuntu’s wifi was gratis, easy to join and always on! By comparison, the access provided by the hotel was mostly down and costed $10 per day.

The participation is insane! Not only Canonical employees participate to the summit but also volunteers from around the world. In Orlando there were around 700 people all interested in making Ubuntu the greatest operating system in the world.

OpenStack is everywhere! Three plenary sessions were dedicated to OpenStack and many sessions of the summit had to do with it. Canonical is putting lots of energy into making OpenStack its cloud. Mark Shuttleworth in one of these sessions made it also clear that he wants to provide resources for OpenStack to maintain compatibility Amazon’s API.

Rackspace distributed the coolest t-shirts at the event: we ran out of three full boxes in a few minutes.

The pace of the summit was not as mad as I imagined after looking at the schedule. Even if there are many parallel tracks from 9am to 6pm for five full days, I ended up with plenty of time free to meet people and talk with them. Sharing the same hotel with a big swimming pool and very nice weather probably helped the conversations. I enjoyed also the free buses available to go out in large groups.

All in all, it was great to be there since OpenStack Developer Summit is modelled after UDS.